information and personal archiving

Kathy Sierra has written a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, post on the anxieties of information overload.

Her key message is captured in the title of her post: The Myth of Keeping Up. As our ability to access information has grown (and grown exponentially), we are increasingly burdened by the thought that we can -- and should -- absorb infinite amounts of information on any given subject. The capacity to access information has been transformed into a social duty to do so.

The unread / unexamined mass of "personalised" information -- emails, blog posts, RSS feeds, shared weblinks, podcasts, Flickr sets -- sits there on the desktop, and we have come to resent it. We feel increasingly inadequate, we bemoan our own lack of time, self-discipline, or motivation.

Kathy proposes some strategies for filtering the mass of data we receive. This is useful and helpful. But the deeper message is that we can never get on top of the pile. We cannot absorb it all; and, importantly, this is not a bad thing.

As information professionals, our role is to help others to access and filter information that is useful to them. It's our job to "keep up", and to filter stuff through to others. However, it's perfectly possible that, in doing our jobs, we may actively contribute to the anxieties Kathy writes about, by overloading users with endless suggestions for new tools, websites, and software.